Graduate Seminar "Current Developments in Mathematics"
Fall 2003
Class meetings: Monday, 2-3:15pm, DRB 337;
Wednesday, 3:30-4:30pm, DRB 140.

 

This page and the links are frequently updated.

Organizer: Sergey Lototsky.
Office: DRB 258.
Phone: (213) 740-2389.
E-mail: lototsky@math.usc.edu.
URL: http://math.usc.edu/~lototsky/GradSem/Fall2003.html

Office Hours: M 10am-12pm in DRB 258; W 11:30-12:30 in the Math Center

This seminar is intended especially for the beginning graduate students in mathematics. A working mathematician spends a good amount of time at various special talks. Such talks are often less than polished, and at this seminar we will learn how to get the most from them. Participants of the seminar are expected to attend the Mathematics Colloquium, which meets on Wednesdays from 3:30 to 4:30 pm in DRB 140.

Colloquium Schedule

There will also be a meeting every Monday, 2-3:15pm, DRB 337, where we will discuss the material from the colloquium and listen to a series of informal talks on various topics of pure and applied mathematics. Many points in those talks will be left to the participants as exercises, and further reading on the topic of the talk will be suggested.

This is a regular graduate mathematics class carrying a 3-unit credit and resulting in a letter grade assigned to each student. In addition to attending the Monday meeting and Wednesday Colloquium talks, the participants of the seminar are expected to:

  1. Write four 200-word reports on each of the lecture series (25% of the grade) Due on Monday following the last lecture of the series.
  2. Write two 200-word reports on the Colloquium talks of your choice (25% of the grade) Due in mid-October and December 1.
  3. Solve a total of 10 problems of your choice from those offered at the lecture series (20% of the grade). Due Friday, December 12, by 11am, in my office or mailbox.
  4. Write a 10-page paper on the subject of one of the lecture series (30% of the grade) Due Friday, December 12, by 11am, in my office or mailbox.
The solutions to the problems can be hand-written, but please type everything else (LaTeX is strongly recommended).

Below are the links to the summary of each Monday lecture and the list of suggested problems.

  1. "From L- and zeta-functions to the Riemann hypothesis" (September 8, 15, and 22) by S. Kamienny.
  2. "P^3: Permutations, Primes, and Polynomials" (September 29, October 6 and 13) by R. Arratia. Suggested problems.
  3. "Computational Molecular Biology", three lectures by three people: "Algorithms for protein sequencing" and a suggested problem by T. Chen (October 20);
    "Eulerian Path Methods for DNA Sequence Assembly" by M. Waterman (October 27);
    "Genome Expression Analysis beyond clustering" by X. Zhou (November 3).
  4. "Topics in Dynamical Systems" (November 10, 19, and 24) by N. Haydn.

Some suggestions on writing a report.

Some info about TeX on the USC Network.

Previous semesters

Fall 2002
Spring 2003

USC Math Department Homepage